Mother’s Day (2001)
Everybody has a mother. Until such time as scientists discover how to
produce healthy babies without the fuss and bother of a real pregnancy,
that’s one definite truth we can share. This unity of origin for all
humanity gives us a starting point for my meditation on motherhood this
morning. I wish to touch upon the mother figure in religion, the idea of
mother as the molder of personality and conscience, the troubling shadow of
the dark mother, the origin of Mother’s Day and the concept of Gaia. In
twenty minutes. Wish me luck, as you grant me the honour of your attention.
The mother figure in religion is pictured on the wall behind me. From the
Venus of Willendorf to the three fold goddess Hecate, to the Virgin Mary,
and all the countless faces she has taken in religions across the world, she
has marked our culture and art from the day humans began to realize they
could shape matter into a representation of something they had imagined.
The mother goddess was suppressed in our Judeo-Christian heritage and I have
no idea why. It was political, some historians say, part of the rules that
were put in place to stamp out the competing religions of the Old World. It
was a joyous act of liberation from idolatry, in response to the revealed
word of God through his prophets, say others. It would be a bit much to ask
any Unitarian congregation to think about that for any longer than it took
to dismiss the idea.
But I believe that from this suppression comes the requirement to restore
balance. Unitarians have struggled with making the language they use in
worship more inclusive, more respectful, and more accurate. If the audience
for Unitarian thought is the whole world of people who wish to make peace,
then we must in the process reach out to those who see the Divine as Mother,
as well as to those who utterly reject the notion that any God is running
the show.
To me, on a deeper level, the suppression of the mother goddess is a
reminder that there are many valuable religious insights to be gained from
many traditions. This means that I am required, as part of my faith walk,
to be respectful of Pope John Paul II’s insistence that the Virgin Mary
directly interceded on his behalf on the day that he was shot. It’s not
something that he’ll ever be able to prove to me directly, but I’m obliged
to take the Holy Father’s word for his conviction that the Mother of God
saved him, and not to poke fun at the apparent incongruity of his belief.
If I do otherwise, my prejudices are working harder than my faith.
This to me is the hardest thing about Unitarianism; that I am called to be
respectful of the belief systems of others, so that I may truly demonstrate
my faith in the essential oneness of all peoples.
All the earth’s peoples tell stories about the bountiful mother and her
shadow the evil step-mother. The bountiful mother is characterized by a
host of attributes, all of which read like merit badges at some saintly
version of the Girl Scouts. Generosity, dignity, tireless effort, wise
speech and wiser silence, healing hands, willing sacrifice, encouragement,
cheerfulness, protectiveness, artfulness, and the ability to make each
member of her family feel individually cherished and understood. Those of
us who are fortunate to have experienced a mother who embodied these
attributes – and I count myself as one – are forever blessed, but in an odd
way we are burdened. It was not until I took the time to learn about the
lives of people outside my family that I learned that not everybody is
raised by a mother like that; the more I learned about my family history and
those of the people closest to me the more it became clear that a mother can
be an emotional millstone – a dark shadow across your whole life – as much
as an emotional liberator and guide.
When I had children of my own, I was thankfully spared thinking about the
responsibility of my new role in life because was too busy enjoying them
when they were little. I had a very hands-on partner, and not a clue in my
head about the emotional and ethical swamp that motherhood was going to toss
me into.
Having my worst prejudices and most unlovable habits mimicked with appalling
accuracy in the adorable accents of a four year old brought me up short. I
cruised through the early years with nothing more complicated than diaper
rash and finding childcare to deal with. Once they started talking, I was
in serious trouble. Why is everything so hard? Why do nice people die? Why
do you do one thing and tell me something else? How come daddy has to go
away to Montreal? Why are you crying?
I have a pretty unorthodox take on childrearing – but I have help. We have
done insane things like consult our children on which house to buy and
taught them when it’s okay to swear and which illicit drugs we tried when we
were adolescents. We have talked to them about our jail time and our scary
experiences and our tough decisions and our biggest mistakes. But not all
at once – then you just sound like you’re braggin’.
I have sometimes been too swift in reducing my apparent divinity as
all-providing, all-knowing and all powerful to mere competence, which I
gained by practice and by having a long honed skill to successfully heed the
mistakes of others. On the whole, I prefer to be Mom rather than Mother
Goddess to my children, and I think the transition was reasonably
successful. I will always be Mom, but my next transition is into Peer, and
I look forward to the day when my worries will be reduced to a manageable
twitch from time to time, as opposed to floor walking midnight agony, while
my far more sensible spouse is logging pleasant hours of unconsciousness.
The successful mother is always aware that she falls short, even if she
doesn’t always see where the shortfall lies. The shadow mother, the dark
mother, the insane mother, the wicked stepmother – none of these see the
children they raise as being anything but a disobedient, willful,
destructive piece of property.
Many of us in this room are in the cold penumbra of the shadow mother. She
has as many faces as the beneficent mother who smiles on all we do. She is
the grey chill of absence, caused by death, lingering illness, insanity,
addiction, senility, irresponsibility, or maybe even a career too personally
meaningful to sacrifice to motherhood. She is the harpy, the critic, the
demon who devalues and eviscerates every good thing we do, using words that
ring in our heads like a gong for weeks and years and decades afterwards.
In her pettiness, her jealousy, her rage, her vindictiveness, her utter
disregard for the truth of your being, she manages to personify everything
horrible about human beings.
It is easy to be lost in the shadow of the dark mother, but there has always
been a way out. We can make a choice to see her, name her, and avoid her,
until we have the strength to deal with her from a place of compassion
instead of fear. We can choose to find nurturing and intelligent women to
associate with, until we learn what we have never before been taught. And
we can learn to be as fierce as she was, to protect ourselves when we have
to, even if the ferocity only comes out in a diary, or therapy. It is the
dark mother who brings the lesson “Never again. It stops here. I won’t be
that way. I choose life, I choose peace, I choose to nurture.”
I have a wicked stepmother story from my own family history. My mother’s
great-grandmother died in childbirth when my mother’s grandmother was nine
years old. She told her best friend on her deathbed to take care of her
husband, and she married him a month later. My mother’s grandmother’s
relationship with her stepmother was never easy. The stepmother ‘took
against her’ so hard that she did something that echoes down the years as a
lesson to peacemakers.
In those days a married couple lived with the in-laws for a few years until
they established their own household. My mother’s grandmother came home
from her wedding day, aged eighteen, and her stepmother told her: Take off
that dress and feed the pigs.
When Aunt Olga – my mother’s grandmother’s third daughter – married a
widower with
two children, Grandma Rempel wept when Olga left with her new family to
homestead in the north. Olga said, why are you weeping, mother? We aren’t
going that far away. But Katharina wept for the stepchildren who would now
suffer at her daughter’s hands as she had. Though she loved her daughter,
loved all her children, the memory of her own stepmother was so powerful in
her that she felt Olga would necessarily behave the same way. Understanding
this, Olga made the decision ‘never again, it stops here’. Her stepchildren,
now in their eighties, were loved; and their stepmother became not the
mother they had lost, but the mother that they needed.
There are three other kinds of shadow mother. They are not evil. They are
grieving. One is the mother who gives up her child voluntarily, to spare
the child the torment of being raised by a woman who cannot afford it,
emotionally or financially; one is the woman who cannot have a child and is
consumed with longing for children; and the last is the woman who has had a
child and lost that child. As we celebrate this mother’s day, let us spare
a compassionate prayer for the women who struggle with infertility and loss,
and whose experience of motherhood has more to do with feelings of grief,
guilt, betrayal, anger and bewilderment than the fuzzy sentiments on a dime
store greeting card.
Speaking of greeting cards with their canned messages, let me read you an
extended and lightly edited quote from Barry Lank, a newspaper columnist in
New Jersey. I was actually going to write a passage that included all of
this information, but he did a better job than I can, so I’m borrowing it.
“Born May 1, 1864, Anna Jarvis was very close to her own mother Ann Marie
Jarvis — they’re buried next to each other in a cemetery just outside the
Philadelphia city limits. Ann Marie was active in promoting children’s
health, and once organized an ad hoc “Mothers Friendship Day.” So after her
mother died in 1905, Anna Jarvis poured her heart and money into promoting
Mother’s Day. President Woodrow Wilson proclaimed it an official celebration
on May 10, 1908.
Fifteen years later, Anna Jarvis was suing to make it stop.
By then, Mother’s Day had become the materialistic, commercialized pocket of
excess with which we’ve all grown comfortable, and it wasn’t what Anna
Jarvis had in mind. She filed a lawsuit to impede the Mother’s Day festival,
and was arrested for disturbing the peace when she verbally abused some
carnation dealers at a gathering of wartime mothers.
“A printed card means nothing except that you are too lazy to write to the
woman who has done more for you than anyone in the world,” she wrote around
this time. “And candy! You take a box to Mother — and then eat most of it
yourself. A pretty sentiment.”
She died broke on Nov. 24, 1948 — the day before Thanksgiving, another
holiday that’s gotten away from us. It turns out she never got married or
had any children of her own. But she did have one offspring: Mother’s Day
itself. Sadly, it grew up to be a great disappointment to her.”
I’d like to escape from the dime store now and get a new perspective. Pick
your spirit up and rise, straight up, 180,000 kilometers up, and picture the
many times reprinted photograph of our earth rising above the surface of the
moon.
Hold that image in your mind. Is Gaia not the most beautiful object in the
universe? Meditate upon the fleecy clouds, the mighty oceans, the
volcanoes, the rivers, the reefs and waterfalls and geysers, the fabulous
array of life and abundance and splendor. Marvel at the patterns of energy
as life forms give way each before each in a dazzling, never foreseen
display.
We are part of that process, that dance of creation and destruction, the
endless recycling. Every breath we take has some component that cycled
through the lungs of Mary the mother of Jesus, and before her a mother
dinosaur, and before her slid under the gills of a trilobite. These things
are beyond conscious awareness, how very close we are to Gaia, and yet it
seems our brains have lagged behind our bodies in understanding our special
relationship with Her. Today life is still good for most of us. We can
walk into the woods and breathe the fragrant air of the temperate rain
forest. We can paddle a canoe into a still place, miles from the noise and
dirt and neediness of the city, and be one with that stillness. We can make
decisions about where to go and what to do with our energy and money that
respect Gaia.
Whether you personify earth as being our mother, or consider the earth to be
an elaborate machine that demonstrates the tendency to become ever more
complex, we can all agree that the earth deserves better treatment from all
of us than it has had. So I return to my original theme. We each have one
mother. We each have one planet to call home in the universe. And for
those of us who are fanciful enough to see the earth as our mother, we can
tap into the deep wellspring of human experience of our mother earth as
sacred, accepting, unjudging, and ultimately benign.
Happy Mother’s Day.
